For
sheer blood-drenched brutality that surpasses anything the Nazis
ever did, we must examine the fruits of the Berlin West Africa
Conference. It was there, in 1885, that King Leopold II of Belgium
was given the vast region of Africa's Congo as his own personal
fiefdom. Much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa was carved up
among the European powers at this same conference.
Leopold's
case for the Congo was certainly bolstered by having no fewer
than 450 tribal chiefs sign over their land to him by treaty.
Leopold's agent in this affair was famed explorer, Sir Henry Morton
Stanley.
In
the culture and experience of these chiefs, a treaty was generally
nothing more than a statement of goodwill between neighboring
tribes. Giving up their land for a few trinkets to a distant foreign
power was inconceivable to them. So why not sign a document in
some indecipherable language?
In
the beginning, ivory was the big prize, but after 1890, with the
invention of the inflatable tire, rubber took over as the ultimate
export from Leopold's so-called Congo Free State. How fortunate
for him that Congo had one of the world's greatest deposits of
wild rubber.
Harvesting
the crop legitimately would be dangerous and expensive. An easier
way would be to enslave the entire male population of the region,
and have them do all the work under penalty of death. The only
question remaining was how to enforce the slave labor, since hiring
overseers to accompany the laborers WOULD add to the overhead.
Well,
one way would be to kidnap family members and chiefs, holding
them hostage so that the workers would return from the jungles
with their rubber quota. To keep the peace, Leopold had a small
private army as well as the Force Publique, made up of native
conscripts, interspersed with bloodthirsty Europeans, and a goodly
number of local cannibals.
OK,
but how do you prevent the conscripted natives from rebelling?
You watch their supply of ammunition very carefully, demanding
a body part of one of the slave laborers killed, as proof that
the bullet was used appropriately. Naturally, these trophies had
to be cataloged and documented.
In
any situation, the cream does rise to the top, and in Leopold's
Congo, one Leon Rom deserves special mention. Rom was a high official
in the Force Publique, and his brutality knew no bounds, shocking
even his fellow thugs. Beyond the normal killing of natives for
any one of dozens of trivial reasons, Rom had a flower bed rigged
with human heads, and kept a gallows permanently erected in front
of his office.
If
this image reminds you of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
it should. More than likely, the Kurtz character was based on
Rom, or a composite of him and his fellow cutthroats, as observed
by Conrad, who was in Congo at that very time.
Leopold's
scheme worked well enough, but word was bound to leak out, eventually.
The
British controlled all the shipping between Congo and Europe.
Edmund Morel, a shipping clerk based in Antwerp, Belgium, noticed
that while ships were coming into port with ivory and rubber,
the only things sent back to Africa were weapons, ammo, and soldiers.
It didn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that this was not
trade, but enforced slave labor.
Morel
raised a fuss about this, and got fired for his trouble. Undeterred,
he embarked on a newspaper campaign to expose the situation, forcing
the British Foreign Office to investigate further. They sent Sir
Roger Casement to the Congo, hoping that Morel's charges were
unfounded.
Casement
not only confirmed Morel's charges, his descriptions of sliced
hands and penises were far more graphic and forceful than the
British government had anticipated.
Meanwhile,
Leopold engaged in a frantic effort to suppress the story, spending
millions to bribe the press and diplomats, while burning tons
of documents, in a vain attempt to purge all records of his atrocities.
In
the end, the Belgian government was forced to intercede, and buy
Congo from Leopold. Protracted negotiations for the buy-out started
in 1906, and concluded in March, 1908.
The
government agreed to assume 110 million francs worth of debt,
even though this included nearly 32 million francs in loans it
had given Leopold years earlier.
The
government also agreed to pay 45.5 million francs towards completing
Leopold's then unfinished pet building projects. On top of all
this, Leopold got another 50 million francs as a "mark of gratitude
for his great sacrifices made for the Congo."
Scholars
set a conservative estimate of 10 million lives lost as a direct
result of Leopold's policies.
This
monarch, named by some as the most evil man who ever lived, died
on December 17, 1909, NEVER HAVING SET FOOT in the Congo.